article from Modern Painters
by Joe Wolin

Jonathan VanDyke's performances, photomontages, and installations undermine macho AbEx bluster.

To view this article as it appeared in Modern Painters, with studio shots, click here.

A pair of sculptural reliefs hanging in Jonathan VanDyke's Brooklyn studio feature wood-framed Homasote panels the color of raw linen, from which protrude delicately tinted cast-resin pipes. They recall the aggressive canvas-and-metal constructions of Lee Bontecou, as well as the rubber tubes and translucent resin used by Eva Hesse. Like works by those artists, VanDyke's panels seem to exist somewhere between the organic and the industrial. Yet on one panel, color spills out from a pipe to form tiny stalactites,while on the other it runs down the dun surface in thin lines. And a moment’s inspection reveals that the color moves, slowly dripping in various hues of acrylic paint from the pipes and onto the studio floor, puddling there in expanding and changing psychedelic slicks reminiscent of Lynda Benglis's poured latex pieces.

KL: Moving beyond the edge of painting would become a major concern of the 1960's, as Allan Kaprow prescribed with his writings on Happenings. You are not making paintings, but orienting the energies that surround painting. Pictorial content, composition, and representation are almost entirely absent. Your dripping pieces do not explode; they burp and gurgle as unpredictable and imperfect objects. The performance of your works is within the pieces themselves. It is not visual work that alludes to its physical construction. It is physical work that produces a visual form. This shift in emphasis is key. The work stresses the world around the painting. And the movement of the paint - its viscosity, instability and volatility - is more important than its final residence.

JVD: I am interested in how Kaprow activates the entire space surrounding art production. My earliest experience with dripping, while in the graduate program at Bard, was in a studio piece I called "Paint Effect Workshop." I had grown tired of the exhausting fastidiousness of my mark. So I gave myself the freely adaptable challenge of moving paint around the studio. This process engendered an openness in my work that I found incredibly pleasurable.

on the work of Jonathan VanDyke
by MARA GLADSTONE

How do we get into the skin of things, and what happens when we do? Jonathan VanDyke proposes a studied exploration of these questions with his new site-specific installation and performance project at Hartnett Gallery, located in the I.M. Pei-designed student center at the University of Rochester. In collecting visual elements from the surrounding environment, VanDyke strips them of their everyday utility, redeploys them as motifs, and then juxtaposes them against other objects, images and people in the gallery. VanDyke’s process sometimes exaggerates or minimizes his gathered elements, makes them organic or artificial, or presents them as art or non-art, thus reifying the structures that circumscribe the everyday life of the university. In this abstracted mirror of the place as we know it, student performers will activate VanDyke’s spatial montage, drawing attention to the ways in which we relate to objects, and the ways they relate to us.

Julianne Swartz & Jonathan VanDyke
Interview for FO_A_RM magazine,
spring 2005

In 2000 an act of arson destroyed new construction at a synagogue in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania. Jonathan VanDyke, then curator of Harrisburg's Susquehanna Art Museum, asked three contemporary artists of Jewish heritage to respond to this event through community-based public projects. The artists Julianne Swartz, Gedi Sibony, and Shira Weinert, all New Yorkers, worked in Harrisburg to create collaborative works with a diverse audience. Julianne Swartz contributed the project Link/Line, for which she ran a continuous red thread for five miles, from the museum to Harrisburg's Jewish Community Center, passing through homes, businesses, schools, and places of worship along the way.

Link to the website of Julianne Swartz: www.julianneswartz.com

Link to the website of FO_A_RM magazine: foarm.artdocuments.org/

Interview conducted on the occasion of the exhibition Grace Hartigan: Painting From Popular Culture, Three Decades, curated by Jonathan VanDyke for the Susquehanna Art Museum, Harrisburg, PA, spring 2000. Excerpted from the exhibition catalogue.
Painting From Popular Culture: A Discussion With Grace Hartigan

Hartigan met with Jonathan VanDyke, over lunch in Baltimore, February 12, 2000.

Jonathan VanDyke: You are often viewed in terms of your associations with abstract expressionism. Yet this show demonstrates that your use of imagery and metaphor, and focus upon content, has been long-standing.

Grace Hartigan: The people who have a real stake in abstract expressionism act as though I never did any figurative work in the '50's. But hopefully the museum people and historians will continue to be interested in the ranges and the different periods of an artist. It is a lot easier on the feeble intellect if you are a one-shot, one-look artist. The subject material I've picked since the '50's, is imagery that either comes from popular culture or from the art of the past. You can break down all the succeeding decades. And the formal basis for all of my work, continually, has been abstract expressionism.